Italy

Berlusconi rebuffed

Bad for the prime minister, good for Italy

THE news that the prime minister of a large democracy had been thwarted in his efforts to move a trial from one city to another would not normally be a cause for cheer. But this democracy, Italy, has not been normal for a long time, and has recently seemed to be lurching towards ever greater abnormality. Evidence of that is not so much that the trial in question was that of the prime minister himself, Silvio Berlusconi, who is accused of bribing judges, as that his efforts to move it were made under a law pushed through parliament last November by his own government. This allows defendants to ask the country's highest court to move their trials if there is a “legitimate suspicion” that the judges may be prejudiced. Had Mr Berlusconi succeeded in this instance, his trial would have had to be restarted from scratch, probably leading to an acquittal under the statute of limitations, which has already helped the prime minister in other cases (see article).

The ruling thus strikes a much-needed blow for the independence of the judiciary. Important in any country, this independence is particularly important in Italy, where business and politics have long been intimately, and often corruptly, entwined. Since Mr Berlusconi came to office in 2001, at the head of a government that commands a strong majority in both houses of parliament, the entwining has become a concentration: the prime minister is the country's richest man, a media tycoon who controls either directly or indirectly almost all Italian television. Rather than rid himself of his conflicts of interest, he has devoted much of his energy to a campaign against the judiciary, which he considers biased against him.

No doubt Italy's judiciary harbours some left-wingers, probably even some rotten eggs. No doubt it would benefit from reform. But so would the pension system, the labour market, indeed the economy as a whole, which the EU commissioner for competition, Mario Monti, describes as being in a state of slow asphyxiation. No wonder Italy, the world's sixth-biggest economy, ranks around 35th or 41st in various competitiveness tables. Mr Berlusconi, though, has yet to show himself serious about economic reform. Resorting to one-off remedies such as tax amnesties and debt swaps—perhaps even a redefinition of the growth rate—he seems keener to make things look better than to carry out structural change.

The one big change that does appeal to him is a constitutional one: he has said that he would like Italy to adopt a presidential system similar to France's, with a president directly elected by the people, or, failing that, he would settle for a strengthening of the prime minister's powers. Good arguments can be adduced for such arrangements, but only in a country where the branches of government are clearly separate and independent, and where there are firm controls on the exercise of power. That description does not fit Italy.

Italians swing between extreme suspicion of their rulers and extreme confidence in the abilities of one man. The faith placed in Gianni Agnelli, whose success in building up his family's company was often equated to success in building up the national interest, was excessive (see article), though not nearly as disastrous as the faith earlier placed in Benito Mussolini. The reaction to Mussolini's fascist dictatorship led to an intense suspicion of personal power, overtaken in the 1990s, after the tangentopoli bribery scandals, by a sweeping antipathy towards almost all conventional politicians. Strangely, the beneficiary of that antipathy has been Mr Berlusconi, in whom many voters seem to have uncritical confidence, even when Mafia turncoats accuse him in court of having had mobster connections, as happened last month.

This week's ruling is unlikely to do the prime minister much immediate damage. He now seeks parliamentary immunity, and the voters seem largely indifferent to his battles with the judges. But it is clear at least that the country's top court is not cowed. To that extent Italy is still normal.